![]() Russia’s seizure of Crimea from Ukraine appealed to nationalist sentiments, but that effect is fading. The oligarchs around Putin are doing well, but most Russians are not. The easy growth in income and prospects that followed the chaotic 1990s are a distant memory. Polls in Russia show that President Putin has widespread support, but the Kremlin has its reasons to worry. Russian honour guards march during a military parade in Red Square, 7 November 2018 ![]() Yet a less visible battle for human rights and democracy in Russia extends well beyond Navalny, as illustrated by the broad range of people and organisations now targeted by the Kremlin. The drama surrounding Navalny and the protests it has sparked have understandably grabbed headlines. Meanwhile, no one has been prosecuted for his attempted murder. And it galvanized many Russians to air a host of grievances regardless of whether they support Navalny. The FSB’s apparent attempt to kill Navalny with a Novichok nerve agent, and then the Kremlin’s arrest of Navalny after he returned to Moscow for violating his parole agreement while getting medical treatment in Germany, boosted his profile across the country. It has been viewed more than 100 million times. His latest, Putin’s Palace, alleges that an enormous estate has been built for the Russian president with the fruits of corruption. Navalny sidestepped them by producing slick documentaries and posting them on YouTube. The Kremlin tries to manage information and manipulate the public mood by controlling television and other mainstream media. Navalny counter-attacked by encouraging the public to vote for candidates from these pseudo-opposition parties in lieu of candidates from the ruling United Russia. Over the years, the Kremlin has built a simulated democracy with a series of ersatz-opposition parties while barring Navalny’s party and impeding others. Last summer while he was visiting supporters in distant Siberia, the Federal Security Service (FSB), the KGB’s main successor, apparently tried to kill him. ![]() Navalny’s support was once said to extend no further than the intelligentsia of Moscow and St Petersburg, but he eventually built a movement across the country. But underneath, it s a voice that has a deep understanding of what it means to be human, and what it means to be alive and constantly living in the moment, always moving forward.It’s not hard to see why Navalny gets under Vladimir Putin’s skin. Fletcher deals with tangible, life-changing things in a style that is, on its face, whimsical. Whimsy has a connotation of lightness, of airy frivolity. whimsy that deals with real emotions, a whimsy that deals sex and death, with love and loneliness, fear and anxiety. Most impressively, he knows how to arrange the words on the page so that you feel like you’re reading art, or poetry, or whatever something tended to, something cared for.” You can feel how he is fulfilled by an image, and how his images fulfill. These crafty permutations are satisfying because they echo our internal patterns of thought and of language. ach moment of carefree wordplay actually serves a purpose: it reveals the author’s process, it shows us the working mind, the mind at work. “Sasha Fletcher’s first novella is like a bird that visits, flutters, migrates south, circles back, sings again, and finally vanishes in the clouds. “With When All Our Days Are Numbered Marching Bands Will Fill the Streets & We Will Not Hear Them Because We Will Be Upstairs in the Clouds (Mud Luscious Press, 2010) Sasha Fletcher has distinguished himself as a writer of great imagination, a careful craftsman of sentences, one attentive to tone and rhythm, to the visual dynamics of the page, to a profluence not beholden to the unbreakable chain of this-follows-that, a profluence sensitive to the reader’s inherent capacity to fill in the mortar between the bricks of text.” ![]() PRAISE FOR WHEN ALL OUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED
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